The conflation of functional consumer object with artwork may be nothing new, but Scott Redford’s surf paintings—rendered by a professional board-maker from fibreglass and resin on painted foam—are a well-handled variation on a theme. The objects themselves, in particular the more minimal ones, are beautiful. Glossy and perfectly smooth, bright red and yellow and blue, sporting the odd G-stripe, they exude all the shiny promise of a freshly minted commodity, together with the surfboard’s redolence of youth, speed and freedom. But at the same time, they take the viewer into the spiritual realm of modernist abstraction. This is more than a knowing wink at art history. It also appears to be a gesture that seeks to reconcile the disparate spheres which the artist straddles: surf culture and the art world.
Redford’s surf culture is not one of wild natural landscapes and extreme risk. Rather it is a culture of sleek surfaces and state of the art design, set against a backdrop of commercial promotion and branding: how (not) unlike the art world! The works appear to embrace the coincidence of these values. As readymade commodities, all that matters is their sign value. They remind me of Patricia Piccinini’s car nuggets, which like chicken nuggets, represent the ‘essence’ of what they are without actually embodying its substance and functionality (Piccinini’s works were also crafted by trade professionals, in this instance custom car detailers). And yet, unlike Piccinini’s works that wear their cute pop aesthetics as a badge of honour, Redford’s ‘essence of surfboard’ aspires to more exalted terrain: the history of art.
In Surf Painting # 6: Blue reflection (after Ian Burn) (2007) Redford invokes Australia’s most significant conceptual artist